Guy Cotter

You know, 100 star just going for the offer of a cheap trip.

So we would run an expedition and we might have, you know, four to six clients and they'll be charged around $80,000 each, US dollars.

That Nepalese operators, because of, you know, just the sheer numbers involved and the economy of scale that they...

can provide, you know, they might offer the same trip for, you know, 40,000 or 50,000.

50,000 times 60 people is very different from, you know, four times 80.

And economically, we looked at that model many years ago and just went, well, we're not going to do that because we're

That doesn't fit with our philosophy of what it should be like being in the mountains.

It shouldn't be like being in a processing plant of people being dragged up to the summit.

You get three minutes on top and then number 62 is going to come through and take your place.

What is happening in Nepal on Everest has just become all about the business and very little about mountaineering.

But in the meantime, safety systems have improved in general.

There used to be a very high fatality rate on Everest back in the

70s and 80s, percentage rates were somewhere around 20% of people who died.

Now that percentage is 1.2%.

It's the safest of the 8,000 metre peaks.

There's been a lot of advances in process, and that has come about.

Initially, it was we Western operators who were coordinating all the logistics on the mountain, and each year we would go back.

We would have more collaboration between the different operators, even though we were competitors once we were on the mountain.

We would collaborate with fixing ropes and having backup safety systems and so on.

That has also been adopted by a lot of the Nepalese operators.